With the background of all modern printers being driverless IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) printers (AirPrint, Mopria, IPP Everywhere ...) and the standard job format being PDF and not PostScript any more for years we will have changes in the architecture of the printing stack.
From the 3.x series on (release end-2023) CUPS will not support classic printer drivers with PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files any more but go totally IPP supporting only driverless IPP printers. To not drop support for legacy printers, drivers are provided as Printer Applications, software emulators of IPP printers.
As many driverless IPP printers are multi-function devices with a built-in scanner, scanning also gets driverless, via IPP or via eSCL,
In this talk an introduction to the New Architecture is given and how it affects GNOME/GTK, what are the requirements and possibilities to support it in GNOME/GTK, and also how it works with sandboxed/distribution-independent packaging.